Do you know how powerful can Pinterest be as a marketing channel for your small business? It’s a gold mine, but you need to understand how to use it in order to get the best out of it.
Today Stiliyana Stoycheva – Pinterest Strategist and Consultant – will share her best tips on how to implement Pinterest as part of your online marketing strategy for your small business as a freelancer or entrepreneur.
Why is Pinterest important for your small business?
It’s important to mention that Pinterest is not a social media channel; it’s actually the third-largest search engine in the world after Google and YouTube.
Over 250 million people are visiting Pinterest every day to find new things to buy, make and do. Why is this important for you as a small business owner? Because you can reach a new audience and potential clients for your services if you have a strong presence there.
It doesn’t matter if you have a blog, YouTube channel, eBay-, Etsy-, or an Amazon business or you have your own site with products or services. Pinterest can help you find new business opportunities! Keep reading to see how.
Related: How to Choose the Perfect Logo for Your Small Business?
Essential SEO tips for your Pinterest account
As Pinterest is a search engine, you should keep in mind that SEO matters, not the number of followers.
SEO means to include some keywords while talking directly to your audience, trying to attract their attention with “call to action” messages like asking them to visit your site, for example.
A couple of places in your Pinterest business account have to be SEO friendly.
Display name
I would recommend that you include keywords from your niche and not only your business name.
Bio field
In the bio field, use keywords to tell the people you’d like to attract how you can help them.
Boards names and descriptions
Other places where you should use relevant keywords are your boards’ names and all your boards’ descriptions. In the boards’ descriptions, you only use a few short sentences using niche related keywords.
Pin descriptions
All your pins should be SEO optimized as well – use important keywords as pins descriptions and add up to five niche-related hashtags.
Once you have all these fields full of keywords, you are on the right way to attract your audience, and they can easily find you!
Focus on building an engaged audience
Stop counting your followers – it only makes you feel bad, and their number really doesn’t matter. You can have just a few followers and have more traffic to your site than someone with thousands of followers. Seriously!
This is true because your pins are visible to everyone – Pinterest is a search engine (!), and you shouldn’t care so much for your followers. It’s best if your followers found you in an organic way and are interested in your pins. You need targeted followers, not just followers who will not care about your content.
Instead of increasing your follower count, it’s better to focus on building an engaged audience following you on Pinterest. It is quality, not quantity, that matters!
How to drive traffic to your website using Pinterest?
After you’ve made your Pinterest business account SEO friendly, you’d probably want to know how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your website.
Here’s what I recommend you to do consistently and what I use every day in my strategy to help all my clients with their Pinterest accounts:
- Pin around 20-40 pins per day – a mix of your pins (to publish in your and the group boards) and other people’s pins.
- Be consistent in your pinning – you need to do it every single day;
- Make sure your pins have good, strong links – review and update (or delete) any pins with broken links.
- Keep your pins and re-pins focused on the brand and your niche;
- Use only pins with high visual quality – prepare vertical size pins with ratio 2:3 and high-quality pictures.
- Check out The Zen Freelancer’s Pinterest – all of the above rules are applied there.
Sounds easy, right? But where is the catch? I would say – there isn’t a catch, except that you should remember that there’s a Pinterest algorithm!
Related: How to Write the Perfect About Me Page for Your Blog (With Examples)
The future of Pinterest
Pinterest is a publicly-traded company. The most common question after this is, “Will Pinterest go the way of Facebook and decrease organic reach, forcing us to pay for ads to retain traffic to our sites?”
Organic reach
I certainly expect that Pinterest would become more “pay to play” over the next few years. As Pinterest is a search engine like Google, they can’t stop the organic traffic entirely – SEO matters, and it should be your top priority. The organic reach is not going to disappear completely so keep on providing fresh and relevant content that the Pinterest users want to see!
Video content
Another trend on Pinterest – video content – is getting more and more popular. There’s still no major change in the way that Pinterest algorithm works, but it seems that – given the success of YouTube – this will be a big part of its future.
Still, Pinterest is the 3rd largest search engine in the world, and you can expect similarities between them to be seen. Video content is accepted better as it’s not anonymous. Therefore, it’s being taken by the users as more trustworthy content. So, if you want to be successful on Pinterest in the future, you could brainstorm some ideas for video content related to your business and apply them in your Pinterest strategy.
About the author:
Stiliyana Stoycheva is a Pinterest Strategist and Consultant, who helps business owners and entrepreneurs worldwide with their internet marketing strategy, with a focus on Pinterest for business.
Stiliyana has solid experience with hundreds of clients from all over the world. She has helped them with highly successful and result-oriented Pinterest management services to reach new customers. She has studied the Pinterest platform in detail and has tested various strategies for maximum performance.
For more questions, help with Pinterest or to stay up to date with everything related to Pinterest, please feel free to reach her out via email stilruseva@abv.bg
On her website Social Marketing Nest you’ll find more helpful information and tips. Don’t forget to follow Stiliyana on Pinterest!
